A 29-year-old man pleaded guilty to perjury this week for taking the witness stand and denying what he told police about an early 2011 murder outside an Uptown bar. Criminal District Judge Karen Herman promptly sentenced Mitchell Marks to 10 years in prison under the deal.

Marks was done in by a statement he gave police in May 2011, four months after his friend William Baham was served a "swirly" at Friar Tuck's: his head stuffed into a toilet bowl during a bathroom scrap.

Baham left the bar, then returned with a .40 caliber handgun, taking his revenge on 19-year-old Errol Meeks, who had helped break up the fight. Baham, 27, fatally shot Meeks in the head and back, on the corner of Freret and Valmont streets.

Mitchell Marks

During the police interview, Marks said he was at the bar and saw Baham come running out of the bathroom. "He told me he wanted to go get his gun. He was mad and he wanted to smash that dude," Marks said.

Marks said he went with Baham to Baham's grandmother's house. They headed back to the bar in separate vehicles, and Marks said he and another man named "Ruffie" had tried to talk Baham out of it.

Marks told police he and Ruffie were just getting out of their car when they heard shots, then saw Baham "running back our way. He jumped back in the truck."

Marks said Baham was carrying a silver handgun with a black handle.

Two months after the interview, Marks was already shying away from his story. According to tapes of his conversations from jail, where he was waiting out a probation hold, he told his girlfriend, "Ima play crazy on them. Ima play dumb on them bitches," referring to prosecutors.

At Baham's trial in July, Marks followed through, denying that he saw Baham come out of the bathroom.

"Isn't it a fact that the defendant, William, told you that he was going to get a gun to smash that dude?" prosecutor Jason Napoli asked him.

"Naha, he ain't tell me that," Marks replied.

William BahamNOPD

"Isn't it a fact that after you went back to Friar Tuck's bar you hard some gunshots?"

"No, I didn't hear that because I never went back."

When confronted with his statement to police, Marks testified that he only gave the police interview because the officer "told that I was going to be charged in a murder or something. I told her whatever and she recorded it."

The jail chats made that argument a hard sell on the perjury count.

Marks also faced a pair of marijuana possession charges from an arrest a few weeks before he gave his statement to police. Those charges were dropped.

His criminal record includes an illegal weapons charge from 2010, for which he pleaded guilty and received a six-month suspended sentence; and a 2010 charge for carnal knowledge of a juvenile. He pleaded guilty to that charge in August 2010, and received a three-year suspended sentence with probation.

As part of the plea deal for a 10-year sentence, Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro's office agreed not to invoke the state's habitual offender law.

"Just so we make it very clear to those individuals who aid, abet and assist people who murder other people: We're going to go after you just as aggressively as we go after the murderer," Cannizzaro said after Marks entered his plea. "If the jury believes him, they could acquit on the murder. I just think it's important for us to let people who want to recant, who want to change their stories, know that it's not gong to be tolerated."

A unanimous jury in July found Baham guilty of second-degree murder after a three-day trial. In August, Judge Franz Zibilich sentenced him to life in prison.

Meeks was from New Orleans but was living in Houston with his father. He had returned for an extended Christmas visit with family when he was killed, said his aunt.